Presently, many patients are confined to their hospital beds for the duration of their treatment. Standard hospital beds provide a sufficiently comfortable support surface for the patients in a supine position.
Frequently though, the patient is interested in either sitting up in bed to be more comfortable or is required by the physician or care provider to elevate from the supine position to an upright sitting position in the course of their treatment. When a patient remains in a supine position for extended periods of time, there is a possibility of detrimental physical consequences. For example, while remaining in the supine position, the patient's circulatory system may not adequately pump blood throughout the patient's entire body. Very often a patient is unable to leave the confines of the hospital bed in order to achieve a sitting position. Therefore, frequently patients are required by their physician or care provider to elevate to a sitting position in order to increase the activity of the circulatory and cardiovascular systems.
In addition to these physical benefits, a patient may want to achieve a sitting position while in his bed for the sake of comfort, reading or watching TV, or meeting with visitors. Very often patients are confined to the hospital bed for long durations and the ability to comfortably sit up is very desirable. One partial solution to this problem, which has proven to be inadequate, is for the patient to prop up his upper torso and back with pillows, blankets or other such materials. While temporarily supporting the patient's back, pillows and the like often shift out of place and offer little or no benefit to the patient's lower body, legs and feet.
Another prior solution to this problem is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,862,529 directed to a hospital bed and chair configuration and assigned to the assignee of the present invention. That patent discloses a hospital bed which is designed to assist the patient in moving from a supine position to a sitting position for the purpose of achieving a standing or walking position. The bed has a stationary frame which is mounted on a retracting frame which moves relative to the fixed frame and allows the foot end of the bed to drop towards the floor causing a head panel of the bed to rise relative to the fixed frame. While the hospital bed disclosed in that patent allows the patient to exit the bed after going from a supine position to a seated position, it requires the relatively complicated structure of a stationary frame cooperating with a retractable frame to achieve this result. Furthermore, for a patient who wishes to merely achieve a seated position while remaining in the bed, the hospital bed to chair configuration includes additional structure not required when the patient does not exit the bed from the chair position.